Michelle Obama has terrible taste. I’ve never attempted to hide my critiques of her fashion choices. On the rare occasion that she pulls it together, she looks amazing. While she’s an attractive woman, she makes bad choices, such as full skirts that draw attention to her hips. Mrs. O seems convinced that cinching her outfit at the waist with some gaudy belt will hide all of her fashion sins. It doesn’t, and my mom and I have named it the “boob belt.” Since Mrs. Obama is tall and high-waisted, the belt usually rests right under her bust. I emailed my mom a photo of this dress with the subject, “OMG. A Formal Boob Belt!?!”

Given her horrific fashion choices, I’m surprised that she’s catching flack for re-wearing clothes. This is the first sensible action I’ve seen from either wing of the White House. While most of her fashion choices are out of reach of average Americans (how many of us can afford to wear Lanvin or Narciso Rodriguez?), she shows some understanding of the economic tone in this country.

So what if she recycles clothes? The FLOTUS is photographed every single day. Wearing an outfit more than once is practical. Her fashion choices are high-end. If you’re going to invest in extremely expensive clothes, wear them more than once! Even the wealthy should show some measure of American sensibility. I agree with Mary Tomer of the Mrs. O blog:

“I think the fact that [the first lady] re-wears pieces from her wardrobe shows deference to the economy … but more so, it’s normal,” said Mary Tomer, author of the book “Mrs. O: The Face of Fashion Democracy” and writer of the blog Mrs-O.org. “Even in the White House, it doesn’t seem practical that a dress or a pair of shoes would only be worn once.”

While the fashion choices themselves are bad, as evidenced by Politico’s slideshow, well-played Mrs. O for making some attempt to be frugal with your extravagant wardrobe.

Good heavens. This has been a long week, it’s Friday, and I’m sick. The feminists are in such a frantic meltdown over Tuesday’s primaries and desperately trying to marshal their troops that I can’t barely contain my glee enough to sit down and write about it.

Given Obama’s desire to kick some ass, John McCain and Snooki tweeting, even more crazed feminist whining,* and growing evidence that South Carolina has the weirdest politics ever, I didn’t think this week could get stranger.

Then I read that Rep. Anthony Weiner was “gored” by a goat.

Why is there not footage of this? Photos of the event show cameras present. A sitting member of Congress was attacked by livestock on Capitol Hill! We need video. In its absence, I can only imagine it went something like this.

Which is why more people need to carry a Flip Cam. You never know when vile liberals will beat up Tea Party members or livestock will turn on elected officials.

*I’m tempted to print out Hanna Rosin’s comment and frame it. Out of every feminist blog post, article, book or publication that I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot, this comment by Rosin is my absolute favorite. It reeks of desperation and anger. You can almost picture her sitting on the floor and crying:

The forward march of progress was really not supposed to happen this way. We were waiting for someone different, better, fresher. Someone more on our team.

Compared to South Carolina, Tennessee politics aren’t that bad. However, the announcement of Bruce Pearl, head basketball coach for the University of Tennessee, endorsing Bill Haslam for governor seems inappropriate at best.

The head basketball coach endorsing a candidate from the family that collectively serves as single biggest donor in the history of the University certainly has the appearance of quid pro quo. I’m in no way accusing wrong-doing here, but it looks suspicious.

Pearl is an extremely popular figure, especially in East Tennessee. Since arriving at UT in 2005, he’s worked a miracle with our men’s basketball team. Prior to his tenure, men’s basketball was viewed as hopeless. In order for Bill Haslam to win the nomination, his support is going to have to turn out in East Tennessee. It’s also the only part of the state where he has high name ID.

The Haslam family’s relationship to the University is too close for one of its high-profile leaders to make an endorsement. This should be seriously questioned. However, the Knoxville media has a long-history of looking the other way when UT does something wrong.

For those outside of Knoxville, the Haslam family essentially runs everything in the area. They own Pilot Travel Centers, the chain of gas stations and convenience stores in the Southeast. Given their vast oil fortune, they’ve made considerable philanthropic donations in the Knoxville area. By all accounts, the family is very generous and philanthropic. Close friends of mine have worked for Pilot and attest that it is a good, family company.

When I volunteered or interned for various nonprofits in college, the general attitude was not to do anything that upset Daddy Haslam, as James Haslam, II is known. The same friends, who were former Pilot employees, also quickly jumped on the Bill Haslam for Governor bandwagon, explaining that the company wouldn’t look fondly on employees supporting another candidate.

The Haslam family is also very Republican. Bill Haslam is currently mayor of Knoxville and is running against Congressman Zach Wamp.

My dislike of self-funding candidates is noted here, and Bill Haslam is about as self-funded as you can get.

Why is it questionable that Pearl endorsed Bill Haslam?

The Haslam family is the single largest donor in  University of Tennessee history. In recent years (I believe it was 2007), they gave an unprecedented $32.5 million to the University with 30% going directly to the athletic department. Since Haslam is the only gubernatorial candidate who refuses to release his tax records, this endorsement appears questionable.

The overall gifts of the Haslam family can be tracked, but since Bill Haslam won’t release his financial records, there is no way of proving that this endorsement is not in return for donations. The donations that are on the record paint a very cozy picture between the Haslams and the UT Athletic Department and the larger University system.

Daddy Haslam served as a Trustee of the University of Tennessee system for decades. He is also the chairman of executive committee for the UT Athletics Board, the body that directly oversees Coach Pearl. University athletic departments are notoriously secretive about donations, so it is impossible to know exactly who and how much in the Haslam family has contributed over the years.

According to current records, Daddy Haslam and his son, James A. “Jimmy” Haslam III (president of Pilot) are members of the Torchbearer Society, the elite group of donors who have given more than $10 million. Two family-operated foundations also contribute to the University: the Haslam Family Foundation, which is listed as donating between $5 million and $10 million, and the Haslam 3  Foundation, which gave between $100,000-$500,000. Jimmy Haslam and his wife, Dee, also established the Haslam Scholars program.

Per their IRS 990s, Bill Haslam is a director of the Haslam Family Foundation. In2008(the latest year a 990 is available), the Haslam Family Foundation gave the University nearly $1.2 million. As a director of the foundation, he would have signed off on that contribution.

Shouldn’t it raise eyebrows when Bruce Pearl, a direct beneficiary of this family through his job at the University, endorses one of the sons? Remember that enormous gift of $32.5 milion? The chunk of change from Daddy Haslam alone gave $9.2 million to the athletic department, which in turn pays Bruce Pearl’s salary of $2.4 million each year.

It could be argued that all of this is Daddy Haslam and brother Jimmy. Knoxville is a smaller city. Prominent people always know each other. There is not necessarily quid pro quo in this situation.

However, Bill Haslam hasn’t operated a transparent campaign. He should release his tax records, which contain a paper trail of his charitable giving. If there was no wrong-doing, they would clearly exonerate him from any misgivings or inappropriate endorsements earned through high dollar donations to the University.

The UT Athletic Department also doesn’t have the best reputation. The football program is currently under investigation from the NCAA for recruiting violations. Like most major athletic universities, rumors have always churned about less-than-honorable activities.

Given Haslam’s reluctance to run a transparent campaign and a long history of questionable actions by the University of Tennessee Athletic Department, shouldn’t this endorsement be questioned?

Four conservative women won last night. Two of them were endorsed by the Queen of Mama Grizzlies. Expect wall-to-wall coverage of this issue for the next few months on both sides.

The subject of conservative women emerging in politics is one that I’ve covered for more than a year. Since the infamous Mama Grizzly remarks by Sarah Palin, I’ve refrained from commenting* and watched the debate evolve. The role of conservative women in feminism is another, much-needed blog post, but I’m excited to see the discussion. On the right, this is a subject that no one has ever wanted to discuss. On the left, it engages a decades-old debate on how to exactly define feminism. Among feminist circles, this is still a messy internal argument. In the coming months, expect a lot more from me on this subject.

With a number of upcoming primaries with female Republican candidates like Robin Smith in my home district of TN-03 or Pamela Gorman, the game continues.

Update 6/10/10: Even more stories via Google alerts.

WaPo: Can Sarah Palin Claim Credit for Last Night?

New York Daily News: GOP primaries: Sarah Palin helps South Carolina’s Nikki Haley and Calif.’s Carly Fiorina win big

CBS: GOP Women Dominate in Tuesday’s Primaries

The round-up so far today. First the feminists.

Jezebel has a fair round-up posted. Well, as fair as Jezebel (i.e. Gawker) folks get. Since two Democrats were on the list, they couldn’t do hatchet jobs on the rest.

Double X gets a few points wrong about the Mama Grizzly endorsements. Orly Taitz is a birther. I don’t know if even the radical fringes of the Tea Party would accept her. To use her as an example of a Palin loss is inaccurate since Palin never even touched that race. Claire Grossman wrote:

Though they’re just as extreme as their female counterparts, male candidates affiliated with the Tea Party like Rand Paul are shown (in a far less head-scratching spirit) as Ayn Randian, spear-carrying individualists. Whatever you think of their political beliefs, mama bears don’t deserve to be hit with the tired “hysterical woman” stereotype.

I agree with Grossman’s sentiment. Women should be discussed and debated on the same terms of men. If you’re going to do a fashion story, look at male candidates too or refrain from style all together. However, I wish Grossman had used better examples. Birthers are crazy and deserve to be ridiculed.

Debra Medina also waded birther territory. She also ran against an incumbent with high name ID who ran a stellar campaign in Texas. Palin also endorsed Perry, Medina’s opposition. Birthers are so far to the extreme of conservative politics, that pushing them aside and calling them crazy is the only option. To given them any serious consideration would only hurt the entire movement. Grossman doesn’t look at coverage of male birther candidates. They’re viewed just as nutty as the women are.

This cycle does prove that women are treated differently. Much of the coverage of these women did result in mud-slinging and name-calling. Haley’s campaign should enter the record books for new lows in public life, but the race in Nevada also got ugly at times. The California race was largely fair. Neither Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina seemed to be attacked or held to double-standards, despite Fiorina releasing the most bizarre campaign commercials ever. I’m disappointed in Fiorina’s victory,* but both women held their own in a tough state while running against men who were positioned further to the right.

EMILY’s List is scared of Carly Fiorina, which is a silver lining for me personally. Bwhahaha!

Stephanie pointed out that Fiorina is already going on the attack against Barbara — no great shock, since she’d been lobbing attacks on TV at Barbara before she even won the party endorsement. Already, choice is becoming a top issue in this race, and we can’t afford to lose Barbara’s leadership on women’s rights in the Senate.

Fiorina’s got a war chest filled with money from the $21-million golden parachute she received after being fired from her job at HP. We’ve got to help Barbara fill her campaign coffers now and make sure she’s ready to fight back!

Given EMILY’s List struggle to adapt to younger feminists and raise money, good luck with that one.

The Right-of-Center Folks:

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Helen Thomas

The interwebs are abuzz with the news that Helen Thomas finally resigned after her racist comments regarding Israel were spread around the web on Friday.

I’ve never respected Thomas. Sure, she was a pioneering journalist and served in the White House Press Corps for more than fifty years, but her biases have been well-documented for decades…at least. This last comment was so over-the-top that her employers and fellow media members could no longer look the other way. Their tolerance for the the elderly woman ran out.

What Thomas said is wrong, and I’m happy to see her gone. However, it frightens me when those on the Right call for infringements on free speech because they don’t like the messanger. While awful, Thomas’ comments were within her First Amendment rights according to the Supreme Court.

Thomas is a vile, racist woman, but what she said appears to be off the clock. She made those comments as an individual to an unknown blogger. It was absolutely wrong of her to say them, but should someone be fired for uttering their opinion on their own time?

While Thomas is of Lebanese descent and by all accounts anti-Semitic given her rantings posed as questions at White House press briefings, support of her “retirement” from the Right only enforces PC speech codes. Freedom of speech works both ways, regardless if we like the message or not. Hate speech and offensive language are vague and are determined by the receiver. Unless we appointed an Orwellian speech code police, Thomas was still within her Constitutional rights.

While I believe that Thomas should be dismissed, it should be for displaying racism and anti-semitism on the clock while working as a professional journalist. There are clearly decades of footage from press briefings that back up this claim. However, the offense that led to her retirement was made as a personal comment. The Right is using this opportunity to knock off an enemy for behavior that the WHPC overlooked for decades. In this case, I don’t believe the ends justify the means.

Situations such as these are sticky. Thomas is arguably a public figure, making it harder to differentiate her personal comments from professional ones. In order to get rid of a figure that conservatives dislike, we’ve embraced the left’s tactic of silencing the speaker when offensive comments are made. This sanitizes our speech as Americans, and only permits “approved” ideas to be uttered. That’s murky territory that the Right should not embrace, regardless of the opportunity.

Furthermore, with Flipcams and web access anywhere, who has not said something stupid that could get us fired? While I’ve never uttered racist beliefs like Thomas, I’m sure I’ve said inappropriate comments on occasion. Most of us are below the radar, and no one really cares until someone makes the news. How is this different from calls to fire Erick Erickson from CNN because he made comments that inflamed the left? Both made statements that offended various segments of the American population. While I agree with Erickson and disagree with Thomas, there are certainly Americans out there who feel the reverse.

Our Constitutional rights are precious and should be respected at all costs. Even when someone I dislike says something incredibly wrong and offensive, shouldn’t he or she have the right to say it? Conservatives are acting no different than liberals on this issue, and that worries me.

I do not want to defend Thomas in any way, but every time someone is publicly flogged or loses their job over controversial comments, it gives defenders of hate speech policies more legitimacy. The Founders didn’t provide a “no offense” clause in the first amendment. The Freedom of Speech is the freedom to offend. While a nearly 90-year-old woman should know better, Thomas is within her rights to say terrible comments like she did.

This is a slippery slope. Those of us on the Right should be wary of shallow victories that undermine our Constitutional rights.

In completely unsurprising news, Salon’s Broadsheet barely took any time at all to blame this on Helen Thomas’ gender. Does Anna Clark really think that the first woman to serve in the WHPC, serve as president for the Gridiron Club, National Press Club and White House Correspondents Association is going to be kicked out a few months short of 90 due to sexism or ageism? That’s a liberal grasping at straws to try to justify the atrocious comments of an old racist and make liberal land a happy place again. If liberals had owned up to Thomas’ proclivities decades ago, they wouldn’t be left with so much pie on their face now. No one comes out a winner in this situation.

Hot Air has an interesting post about the Cash for Clunkers Keynesian economics test that Speaker Pelosi and other Democrats decided to thrust upon Americans last year.

It did nothing.

Let me clarify that. It did nothing in the new car market. Ed Morrissey didn’t cover the effect it had on the used car market.

He writes:

The data show that the government stimulus did increase sales — but that the following month, sales dropped in proportion to the spike.  The three-week incentive program simply moved sales from the future into the present, and did nothing to increase organic demand even in a relatively short run.  Sales had already begun to rebound in the spring, even with the Cash for Clunkers proposal moving through Congress.

What this chart doesn’t show is the poor timing of the program.  C4C hit as dealers would have been discounting vehicles anyway, in order to make room for the new models that arrive in September.  Instead of hitting the point where demand might flag, the C4C program overlaid an incentive-rich period in the sales cycle for auto dealers.  That killed demand when the new models did arrive, which likely forced dealers and manufacturers into pushing hard on incentives that may not have been needed otherwise.

He adds that the program did cost Americans because Congress borrowed and spent billions to promote it.

How did removing nearly 700,000 used cars from the national inventory affect price? Let’s think back to Econ 101 in college…

Manheim Consulting released a report on 2009 car sales. Per their executive summary (full report is $250):

The 15th edition of Manheim Consulting’s Used Car Market Report (UCMR) explores the economic and industry trends that specifically influenced the demand for and supply of used vehicles in 2009. It was an unprecedented year during which used vehicle prices soared as consignors had fewer vehicles to remarket. Meanwhile more franchised dealers turned to used vehicles to support their stores and independent dealers fine-tuned their inventory to emphasize faster turnover. Dealers often repeated that finding the exact models they needed took more effort than in the past.

Reason Magazine wrote:

Too bad used cars are becoming much more expensive. Demand for used cars is up, and supply is down. People traded in 3 million fewer cars last year than in the pre-recession years. And perhaps you recall those 677,842 functional cars we junked as part of the Cash for Clunkers plan? Yeah, those aren’t on the market either.

Like millions of Americans, I prefer to buy used cars. Readers may remember that my life was spared in a horrific accident with a tractor trailer that totaled my car back in January.  This forced me back into the used car market while I was between jobs this winter.

Given financial constraints and an abhorrence of borrowing money for a depreciating item, I balked at spending very much. I grew up listening to Larry Burkett on the radio, so I’m brainwashed to only buy used cars. I thought it would be tough, but not impossible. I wanted to replace my late model Accord with another one. In 2006, I purchased my now-totaled 1996 Accord for around $5,000 with 48,000 miles on it to replace my 1989 Accord that died with 205,000 miles. This followed a pattern of other low-mileage used cars that my parents always purchased.

There was nothing on the market. Absolutely nothing. Used cars were at a premium. Even adjusting for inflation since 2006, the few used cars for sale had higher miles and were around 30% higher than the market in 2006. I looked for four months in both Tennessee and the DC Metro area. I finally ended up buying my mom’s late-model Honda Accord when she decided to get a newer minivan.

The differences in the two searches were staggering. The volume of inventory was dramatically lower than in 2006. The market had responded to the most basic law of economics. When supply is low but demand continues, the price goes up. Cash for Clunkers killed the used car market.

This leads me to ask a question that Democrats always love to throw around: what about the poor people?

I’m middle class, and I struggled to find a car. What about low-income people who depend on clunkers? The Cash for Clunkers program directly pitted two key Democratic constituencies against each other: environmentalists and the impoverished. Individuals making only  minimum wage don’t have the luxury to care about polluting the environment. And before you attack me, please remember that I’ve worked extensively with social service organizations and spent two years as an AmeriCorps VISTA. These are fields that I know and understand.

Kiplinger reports that the market is unlikely to rebound until 2012. Hope you don’t have to look for a used car anytime soon!

Yes, capitalism is harsh. But you know what’s even worse? The government interfering with markets that indirectly end up hurting the very people they claim to be helping.

CAMERA-READY: When President Obama (with Vice President Biden) announced Elena Kagan's nomination, her style was tidy but also quite frumpy. (Susan Walsh - AP)

Just when you think everything that could be said about Elena Kagan has been said, the Washington Post goes for the fashion card. I’m not surprised. I anticipated an article coming out like this. I was just waiting to see if it would be the WaPo or Politico.

The point of the article is to express once again that fashion in DC is boring because anything fashion-forward or fun makes the individual appear frivolous and silly. WaPo writes:

Looking drab has its advantages for both men and women in the nation’s capital because it insulates them from accusations of superficiality — a sure-fire political career killer. And as a society, we still cling to certain cliches about absent-minded professors whose brilliance is only matched by their just-rolled-out-of-bed appearance. We connect brains with bad clothes.

I agree with prevailing thought on this. Regardless of how much I dislike wearing business suits on regular occasions, first impressions are partially determined by appearance. Until we can rewire the human brain, people in DC should dress seriously. No amount of lamenting from journalists can change that. Can you really take Rep. Corrine Brown seriously after watching this video?

Business suits are generally awful on women. Aside from the Chanel style, they’re a drab feminine version of a male suit and was designed to make us more accepted in the working world. Aside from shoulder pads and ties, they haven’t changed that much since the 1980s. Jackets are more fitted and skirts are shorter. They’re still overwhelmingly boxy and boring. It’s a fact of life that we have to deal with. You have to go back to Joan Crawford’s in the 1940s style suits to find anything interesting. Bottom line: we’re left working with bad material. Unless you’re very tall or extremely thin, finding a suit with the perfect fit is tough.

Secondly, I actually think Kagan is doing pretty well. She’s a woman of certain age and body type. Her suits have been fitted and the skirt length appropriate. While she’s probably the type of woman who would look better in pantsuits, she’s being completely appropriate and wearing a skirt. How many times has Hillary broken this rule?!?

Keep in mind that I do not support this nomination. As Newt Gingrich pointed out last week, she’s anti-military. She’s not the worst that Obama could have picked, nor is she the best. Since I disagree with President Obama on virtually every policy point, chances are that I will never be happy with any judicial nomination that he makes. However, her fashion choices haven’t been that awful. I don’t like everything Kagan wears, but overall, she’s done fairly well. Due to a combination of age, body type and decorum, she’s picked suits that aren’t bad.

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Earlier this week, the LA Times focused on the trend of women purposely opting for traditional housewife roles. My friend, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, wrote about it and drew my attention to the story. The article focused on several female bloggers. Most were moms, but one woman, Taryn Cox The Wife, is single and writes about her expectations for wives and pushes styles and etiquette of bygone eras.

Finding her 18 rules for wives was discovering a kindred spirit. Taryn is much more affluent and moves in different social circles (I could be the middle class version), but her rules essentially sum up my lifestyle. She posts ideas and guidelines that I’ve never been brave enough to publish on my blog.

Shocked, I posted it on Facebook. Some of her rules, I disagree with, and I would add some.*  While I think her blog is a bit pretentious and the use of WIFE is taxing,** I mostly agree with her. Surprisingly, a number of my friends also replied that they loved it.

It was extremely validating to discover that I’m not alone in desiring the traditional life. Even in the midst of career-obsessed cities like New York and DC, there are other women out there like me.

What has prompted this? Pop culture? A rebellion of conservative morals? A yearning for simplicity in a world that has dramatically changed in our lifetime?

I think the answer is a combination of all three.

Being a housewife is hardly a new trend. Even in the height of the radical women’s movement, there were still young women who chose traditional roles and opted for the home and hearth. My mother is a prime example.

Until there’s an emergence of a counter-cultural movement that combines pop culture with politics, the media takes no notice. Between the show Desperate Housewives, the reality show spin-offs Real Housewives and the sudden appearance notice of conservative women on the political scene, the media has discovered that not all women want careers or march through the streets burning bras.

Much of this is driven by pop culture. Kitsch is very much in right now. Having collected vintage furniture and memorabilia since I was about 10, I’ve noticed the price of items from 1940s-1960s skyrocket. There are also new lines of retro-inspired decore and gadgets for the home. Thanks to Mad Men, the 1950s/60s style has returned to clothing, and martinis have been popular since Sex and the City launched the return of the Cosmopolitan in the late nineties.

A return to nostalgia was inevitable.

Keep in mind that the Millenial generation is just approaching 30 (gulp). We’re starting to buy homes and start families. We are also the generation raised by the most liberal group in history. Many grew up with working mothers and permissive guidelines. Is it surprising that adults who grew up in daycare would want a different family environment for their own offspring? At some point, the generation raised in the hyper-sexual media landscape will say “enough is enough.” We’re a generation without a shock factor. It’s counter-cultural to be traditional.

Secondly, it is typical for younger generations to rebel. The Baby Boomers rebelled against the traditions and morals of the Silent Generation. What we don’t hear about is that the Silent Generation rebelled against the excesses of the Jazz Age. It’s a generational cycle.

People also return to “simpler ages” when society radically changes.

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What makes a writer? Whether you’re a teenager pouring your heart into a journal or a cynical editorial writer, the personality type that must document with the written word is unique. Croupier, a 1998 Clive Owen film, captures the perspective of a writer. In one of my favorite scenes, Owen’s character, Jack, describes his desire to write while riding the Tube. (From the screenplay):

JACK stands, with an unlit cigarette, in a crowded moving train. He looks at the faces, MEN and WOMEN. He sees PEOPLE reading books. He looks at the TITLES: Romantic fiction, Classics, Business Management, Thrillers, Self-Help, Cooking….

JACK’S VOICE
Jack imagined people reading his book. One day he would enter their heads, play with their imaginations, test their feelings…

Writing to advocate for a cause or political writing is perhaps the height of playing with readers’ emotions and imaginations. Mary Pipher makes an interesting argument that writing can invoke social change in her book, Writing to Change the World. While the written word won’t feed hungry people or stop bullets, it can alter behaviors that make those changes. She writes from a solidly liberal perspective, but her book was informative and offered practical guidelines and suggestions on become a better advocacy writer. If you write for advocacy or political causes, professionally or not, I’d recommend it.

However, her book prompted more questions than answers for me, particularly about bias and perspective.

Even in her quest to be unbiased, Pipher’s liberal attitude showed through her writing. In one story, she shares how a friend from a writer’s group revealed that she was a Republican after the group had met for more than a year. Rather than just accept that her friend arrived at different political opinions than she did, Pipher had to justify the friend’s political persuasion by extraneous forces: the friend came from a “military family” and married a “very conservative man.” It wasn’t enough to simply accept that this woman had a different worldview.

Even Pipher’s examples show her inherent bias. Early on, she acknowledges that she’s tried to not be partisan, but her examples and sources reveal her preferences. She frequently rallies against the Patriot Act (which I agree with but wonder how she felt when that was reauthorized under a Democratic majority?) and uses environmental advocacy examples.

Her examples made me wonder how readers react when reading my blog.

My blog and Pipher’s book are two different mediums. By the title, you can tell what my opinions are going to be, and I never couch them under neutrality. Pipher’s book suggests a neutral tone. Is it possible to be neutral and objective? I used to think that it was, but I’m not so sure anymore.

So much feeds into our biases. The source of our news, our backgrounds, education, friends, interests and religious views. Dan Lehr, a blogger at the ABC-affiliate in Chattanooga, is constantly encouraging conservatives to be more open-minded and regularly sends me links via Twitter to David Frum columns. I usually laugh and tell him that only liberals take Frum seriously (as Red State explains, he’s a Polite Company Conservative. The worse kind. I used to be one and couldn’t handle it any longer.), but I understand his goal. In our media-saturated environment, liberals primarily use liberal sources (as evidenced by Pipher’s book), and conservatives only read conservative sources.

However, many of the comments I get from readers are ones telling me to not be so opinionated or self-assured. One of my favorite comments came when Washingtonian.com profiled me. A person commented, “Adrienne Royer has decided opinions and knows how to express them.”

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President Tech-Savvy?

Remember the 2008-2009 Barack Obama? The one who praised Facebook, online fundraising and online organizing for his victory and forced the National Security Agency to build a super-deluxe secret security system for the official POTUS BlackBerry?

Either the 2010 Obama has done a 360 on his tech-love, or the most transparent administration evah was lying about its integration of technology and social media. Per The Guardian:

Yesterday however, the president admitted he could not operate an iPod or iPad, as he warned the students against becoming distracted by technology when they are already graduating “at a time of great difficulty for America, and for the world”.

“With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,” Obama said.

“All of this is not only putting new pressures on you. It is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.”

Ironically, David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, was in Richmond to discuss the integration of the 2008 campaign with technology. The very same weekend Obama revealed his Luddite side, Plouffe told the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “…the use of technology to communicate through online and social media was ‘the heartbeat and engine’ of Obama’s groundbreaking and historic 2008 run for the White House.”

Which was it? Does Obama suddenly have technology amnesia or did the campaign cleverly hide Obama’s ignorance by feeding him the right talking points through the help of his BFFs–the Teleprompter and CrackBerry? The campaign did nimbly use Facebook and online fundraising (their use of Twitter frankly sucked), but time is proving that these areas were further down the campaign totem pole than previously believed.

If the 2008 Obama campaign viewed technology as a lower-tier activity, that’s fine. Plenty of campaigns, particularly on the right, have used digital media from the candidate on down. We’re no longer arguing the legitimacy of engaging online. However, if Obama is a techno-phobe, and evidence points that way, he is most definitely not the first Tech President.

As soon as I heard Obama’s comments, I remembered his 2009 admission that he had never used Twitter before. While answering a student’s question in China, he said:

“I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.”

In order to be the true first Tech President, the candidate should personally employ technology to spread his or her message and connect with supporters. Given that there are a number of candidates in 2010 races running their own Facebook profiles and tweeting, this should be expected from a presidential contender. It is absolute hypocrisy to award Obama this designation when he clearly has an axe to grind with the technology that got him to the White House.

While the Obama campaign obviously misled the American people about the importance of technology, Plouffe’s statements he made in Richmond are accurate:

Plouffe said the campaign was built using the Internet to engage voters in volunteering, contributing money and “sharing the message” amongst themselves. Connecting these people — not only to the campaign but to each other — helped them build trust with prospective voters they engaged both online and face-to-face.

“There is a lack of trust — in government, in business leaders, in academic leaders, even in faith leaders,” Plouffe said. But, he said, “People trust each other.”

Now, in the future, those grass-roots campaigners will be equipped with interactive mobile devices that allow them to pull down voter lists, videos and the latest campaign information to help make the case for their candidates.

The keys to success will be making campaigns more accessible, providing fast responses and striving to not appear slick.

It is possible to have technology as a focal point without the candidate being directly involved. However, they appear to have blatantly lied about being authentic. Either Obama was involved with the use of technology or he wasn’t. It’s time to put the “Obama is so tech-savvy!” myth to rest and admit to the sleight of hand. Perhaps Plouffe should remember his own advice:

“You’ve got to be authentic. People are looking for authenticity,” Plouffe said. “They are hungering for it.”

H/T TechRepublican